If Griffith were less extremely startled or in pain, he might have taken the time to fully analyze this situation. As it stands, he instead yells "Ow! I am in pain and extremely startled! This is unpleasant!" before really catching up with things.

Someone [which his memories helpfully explain is one of his drones, named Nam] arrives with water.

"Good morning, Controller. How are you? Is there anything you want?" it asks. [Remembered context: drones aren't treated as people, and also get impersonal pronouns.]

"I am extremely disoriented and also don't seem to have full continuity of identity with the person occupying this body as of several minutes ago. Also, I may have a concussion, and I would like to be checked for injuries."

He winces. Right. Norms. "Arrange for me to be checked for medical issues that require treatment aside from rest associated with head injuries."

The drone extends its tongue – which seems to be more than a foot long – as well as makes an oscillating extension-and-retraction motion with its back tentacles. It also looks intently at Griffie.

"This drone detects no noticeable difference between you, Controller, currently, compared to before you were injured," Nam says.

"Are you currently incapable of detecting injuries yourself, Controller?"

[Remna, his species, have body control, which is like proprioception on steroids. It's expected that he'll be able to tell whether he has a bodily injury. Gifit was average at it, but it should be enough. It requires doing a specific mental motion, accessing qualia previously unknown to Griffith. It will say that the injury is on the way to healing and that he doesn't perceivably have brain damage – it's painful because his shell-forming matrix is injured. It's minor, though.

Pain can be suppressed with body control, but that requires above average body control Gifit didn't have and didn't bother to improve.]

"This drone can arrange either for a doctor to make a house visit, or arrange transportation for you, Controller, to be transported to Kosfor City to be treated, either via a carriage or by locomotive."

"I am capable of detecting injuries myself, but failed to do so due to extreme disorientation, and requested assistance due to a context-inappropriate habit. I do not perceivably have brain damage, just a minor injury to my shell-forming matrix."

Does Griffith happen to know the rate of impairment to body-control senses that causes them to falsely report things are fine? Wait, no, that's … he's going to ask about that. "What is the base rate of impairments to body-control that cause the impaired entity to falsely believe himself uninjured?"

"Apologies, Controller, this drone does not know. This drone believes that a doctor might have such knowledge. Its knowledge of biology tells it that injury detection is done distributively, through nerve clusters situated throughout the body, and so have independence from the central nervous system."

Nam will remain standing still the whole time, save for the gentle oscillation of its aftendrils. 

"Make that query happen if it's not too costly, and bring me … scratch that, I am not going to ask for acetaminophen. I don't remember the chemical formula and I don't know how it'd interact with my physiology and I really don't know if it's sold here. Ugh."

"Yes, Controller," Nam says. "This drone can connect to the teletype network and make queries to the medical service you are subscribed to, which is Nalem Medical."

[The teletype network is a fixed cost, billed seasonally – there are three seasons in the year, each lasting a gross days. Many people, especially those who are living in remote locations, are subscribed to a medical advice service which can answer health questions for you. This is also billed as a subscription seasonally, so asking questions won't cost any extra money. It will only cost money if he actually goes and has a doctor come to examine him, or goes to the doctor himself.

You can totally go to a doctor different to the one you're subscribed to to answer your health questions, but like why would you want to do that, since the medical query service doctor already has your previous questions in their records and you can save time explaining.]

[Griffith will know that Nam has proactivity training, but it's been instructed not to leave or go do what it's been told unless it's been dismissed or told to execute its orders.]

[Griffith will also know that they do, in fact, sell acetaminophen here, and that he has some on hand. Here it's only indicated for pain relief and not fever, though. He also has stronger painkillers like morphine.]

"Go do that."

Okay. So. Medical stuff is now delegated and feels like it's probably somehow fine despite how incredibly disoriented he is. He should really stop and think.

He's in an unfamiliar body. The new body is overall good, but his somewhat under-considered plans to use estradiol for physiological changes are probably not going to happen given that he's part of a single-sex species now. …more importantly he's just not going to senesce, which is great, hooray for not senescing.

On the subject of death, what is going on with Gifit Zudas Reimas? Does Gifit need some kind of urgent attention? How is he supposed to coordinate that, given that what happened to him seems highly unprecedented and people are probably going to assume he is Gifit but with a personality shift?

Right. 'People'. That term in the local language doesn't seem to refer to sterile workers such as Nam. This seems concerning and bears further investigation.

Also, people-and-drones can say mistaken – no, inaccurate statements on purpose. Statements someone says with full confidence – no, with signals of full confidence – might be wrong. Someone might say 'I will pay for your tea with this rock, which is highly valuable' when the rock was not in fact valuable, sort of like how an orchid might appear to be a female bumblebee despite not being one. This has massive implications, but he's not quite sure what they are.

Still, this is probably less urgent than Gifit's status. …there really isn't anything relevant to this in Gifit's memories, is there.

Nam will bow deeply – his torso perpendicular to the floor – and will leave, closing the door behind it slowly.

Yes, 'people' does only refer to Keepers like him, not drones like Nam. 

Nope! The last memory Griffith can access is Gifit falling...and then it ends there. Maybe he went and possessed Griffith's old body – who knows.

Nam returns several minutes later, and does the same bow he did when entering.

"This drone transmitted information about your current status to Sir Nalem, Controller. Sir Nalem said that the base rate for body control injury false negatives with regard to head injuries is about two pergross. He says that when there is damage to nervous tissue, body control will give either no response or weird responses, which both indicate injury – when querying whether parts are healthy via body control, there is a base response that they give which indicates health, not no response.

Sir Nalem said that he can transmit exercises for querying body part status using body control, focusing on the brain, if this would be helpful to you, Controller. He said that it's free, but that the exercises will take upwards of an hour or more."

"Go request transmission of those exercises—actually, hold. I have two sets of memories. One set belongs to a mammal by the name 'Griffith Young'. One set belongs to the body you are familiar with. I identify primarily with the memory-set and personality associated with 'Griffith Young', but … this body does not belong to me, and if measures can be taken with regards to the well-being of the person I remember previously occupying this body, that would be important. …but my original body was senescing and I don't actually want to let go of this one, it isn't. This probably sounds like some form of extreme confusion and I'm not sure what would be convincing evidence of my model of this situation. Go summarize this to the doctor and if the doctor still thinks it's appropriate request those exercises, I don't have better plans for the next few hours."

Nam displays no outward signs of confusion – it's well trained in impassivity – but internally it's very confused.

Nam will...go do that. It bows and leaves.

The wait is considerably longer than several minutes and takes a quarter of an hour.

Nam returns.

"Sir Nalem said that he has never heard of anything like this in the medical literature. He also said to do the exercises – if they report that you have no brain injury, then the problem – if it is a problem; he said that you might not see it as one – is purely psychological and outside his realm of expertise."

A few more minutes pass while the teletype machine prints out the exercise instructions. The exercise seems to consist of someone – it's assumed you have drones helping you – prodding various parts of the head, neck, and shoulder, and also paying attention to certain sensations and qualia, which it appears that Gifit and his language install have words and concepts for, but which Griffith doesn't. It does seem that remna have the capacity to feel – as in the feeling of touch – their insides the same way you might feel something brushing up against your arm, which is the basis of the techniques. If Griffie is familiar with bodyscan meditation, this will be very similar!

"Confirm that, if it were somehow the case that Gifit's personality was replaced with that of another person from another world, there's not really anything we can do about it. Then return to me and assist me through these exercises."

Griffith pauses. Right, this. "Go do that."

He keeps talking, but less loudly and directedly. "Why did the past occupant of this body order you to require this kind of confirmation and not prompt me for it, anyway. Probably I'll remember if I think about it."

Bow, then exit.

"Sir Nalem said that, if you, Controller, were from a different world and possessed this body, but retained the old body's memories, then this is empirically indistinguishable from undergoing a personality shift with fantastic confabulation. This is also the more parsimonious theory, and so it is the one that he would operate under, since it requires making fewer assumptions. Sir Nalem does not know of any alternate worlds, nor manners by which they might be contacted, and even if so, he has no idea how to contact your presumable previous world specifically. Therefore, he says that there is nothing that can be done about it, unless there was some way to distinguish between 'alternate world personality possession' and 'personality shift with confabulation'.

He says that you should see a therapist if the changes are ego-dystonic."

Sadly, Nam leaves before Griffith's next words come. However, [Griffith will know that Gifit simply preferred his drones not to leave unless explicitly told, aesthetically, rather than for some practical purpose – Nam's proactivity training is good enough that it can model Gifit's behavior and tell whether he wanted them to immediately execute orders or to remain and hear more. Griffith will also know that people here really care about aesthetics and the coherence thereof! There are provincial city taxes to ensure that, in many places.]

"The changes are not ego-dystonic. They come with a belief that I have acquired novel information such as a complete language I do not recall designing, and if that's false I don't like it, but I like my current personality. …also, my current personality means I want you to not require explicit commands to leave, it seems really annoying and I think the past occupant of this body was unreasonable for finding it aesthetically pleasing. I'm ongoingly surprised that you're following my commands instead of trying to forcibly retrieve the previous occupant of this body somehow or otherwise not following my instructions even if you can't do that, describe your reasoning there. If someone used chemicals to smell like this body and I was drenched with strong non-remna odor chemicals would you follow that person's instructions or mine?"

"You are currently speaking Standard Imperial, Controller, which was initially designed by the Imperator but whose management was passed down to the Imperial Standards Authority. It is spoken by all Imperial citizens, of which you, Controller, are one.

Yes, Controller, this drone will now optimize over its model of your desires in considering whether to leave or stay, rather than relying on explicit commands.

This drone's training focused on obeying the Keeper named Gifit Zudas Reimas, and Imperial law defines this by means of specific bodies. You, Controller, are in said body, so this drone will obey you. Perhaps some other Keeper would have preferred to define identity to their drones based on personality, but this seems unlikely, given that people's personalities change. Also, you, Controller, retain 'the old personality's' memories, and memories are an important part of identity.

In any case, biologically speaking, you are still its Controller, because your genetic material has not changed – therefore, operating on the fact that drones evolved to serve their Controllers so as to propagate its genotype, this drone ought to continue serving you. This drone was trained not to look at things this way, but it is still a very natural model to adopt.

A drone operating on instinct, such as drones poorly trained or untrained, would not. This drone will continue to obey you, but only after confirming via other means. It would likely cause distress, however, since the instincts not to obey an entity displaying the wrong pheromonal signals would have to be suppressed."

"Understood. Assist me through the exercises now."

Nam will do that, and will poke and prod Griffith's body with its fingers as per the instructions.

The instructions about focusing on sensations and qualia are detailed, and Griffith will feel weird bodily qualia that he hasn't felt before! It may feel mildly disorientating, as though touching or palpating his internal organs. Querying Gifit's memories will indicate that this is totally normal and to be expected, and actually kind of boring.

It takes one and a quarter hours, because it takes longer than usual to get to the correct state of mind to sense things with body control – in this way it's similar to meditation – but it's within the expected-range-of-variation. Nam will ask whether he feels this sensation rather than that sensation when prodding on a part, or asks what sensation he feels on focusing on a particular locus. Nam writes down Griffith's answers at each step. At the end, Nam will transmit the results, and it comes back fine on all counts.

Nalem will say, indirectly, "Your results are all normal – there's no damage to your brain, spine, or nerve clusters. If the pain doesn't resolve after six days, or if you're still concerned, contact me again or visit my clinic."

Well, if Griffith doesn't have brain damage, he is going to take a walk around what is probably a very fancy and expensive estate which apparently is legally his for now, even though this isn't really his body.

Walking is good for contemplation. Most of Griffith's effort in the recent past has been related to gaining income, household upkeep including taking care of his dog, and trying to prevent senescence-related deaths. Senescence does not seem to be a going concern and Gifit appears to have delegated day-to-day labor to his worker drones. Griffith left a will regarding Cassie, if his original body is dead, and if someone else is in his original body hopefully that someone else will be responsible, though they might not be. Either way it's not under his control at this point. Given this, it's not really clear what his goals are going forward, but he does have time to think about it.

Nam will follow Griffith unless he tells it to go away. [Most Keepers keep at least one drone by their side at all times both for practical and instinctual reasons.]

It's not aesthetically fancy by Zmavlipre standards, but it's probably fancy by Griffith's standards. The main house is made of brick, and so will the ancillary structures for the drones be. [Only the drones which manage the house and attend to Gifit directly actually sleep in the main house – the rest of the drones which work on the plantation sleep on a separate structure close to the main house. There is also a shed containing tools, heavy equipment and transport equipment, and a large warehouse to store the harvest, process it, and package it.]

Drones he passes by will bow to him unless they're carrying something heavy.

Are there ornamental carvings out here too? Gardens in addition to productive land? What does a tea plantation on a hill look like, anyway? The architecture continues to evoke the organizational structure, which evokes unpleasant comparisons. Gifit's memories are quite insistent that the drone issue is fine. Griffith wishes he'd read more about eusocial animal dynamics in an environment where people couldn't lie and nobody had a strong investment in it being okay for queens to do whatever they want with their sterile workers, because every source he can find here is going to be subject to that pressure and capable of dishonestly.

The main building has ornamentation in the form of carvings on its facade. No statues or sculptures here. [Gifit wasn't really into that, but he knows that that's popular. Also, Gifit will say that ornamental art is more popular than fine art in Zmavlimu'e – art which blends into the environment and contributes to a coherent whole rather than art which demands your whole attention.]

Gifit has a garden! It's mostly around the main house. People have spent many, many hours breeding flowers which both smell good and look good! If Griffith oscillates his tentacles – rhythmically extending and retracting them – or extends and retracts his tongue, he'll be able to smell the flowers keenly even from far away, and even be able to separate out the smells in them as though picking out a voice from the din of a crowd. The smell qualia will be very surprising to Griffith even though it will be totally normal to Gifit. He'll be able to smell many things, including the soil, his drones, and the plants. It will stop if he stops oscillating, though he will still be able to smell with his nose, which is comparable to the upper range of sensitivity for humans.

The main house is situated on the edge of the property, with a small road leading directly from the house to the front gate marking the edge of the property, and a little further connecting to the main road. Behind the main house lies the plantation, which consists of tea shrubs grown in rectangular rows so that drones can pick the leaves. [Tea cultivation is very labor intensive, and must be done manually – there are no machines which do it with the delicate care required both to examine the leaves to see if they're an an appropriate stage to be picked, and also to pick them in a way which doesn't destroy the leaf.]

Griffith is going to stand around and actively smell the garden. It's a very nice garden. It would be on some level extremely easy to be distracted by being a rich immortal with enhanced senses and just hang around enjoying the least effortful form of that lifestyle until he gets bored of it.

He queries Gifit's memories. Do drones lie to their controllers? What, in full detail, is the consensus view around drone cognition and moral standing, and what does Gifit know of that backs this view? Also, less importantly, are domesticated companion animals a thing?

There are several scents there: ylang-ylang is the most dominant one, followed by jasmine. Then a bunch of other ones which Gifit hadn't developed the discernment skill to separate out [it is possible to cultivate it, as a subcategory of body control]. It will simply blend into Good Floral Scent.

Honestly that's kind of the default Zmavlipre lifestyle, and many people just Do Nothing for many years and only doing Something Substantial occasionally. [Zmavlipre generally don't have the same drive for ambition, recognition, or set-apart-ness that other sapient entities might have. The vast majority are content to simply sit there and enjoy pleasurable qualia.]

[Drones basically never do and never have the impulse to, but they'll lie to you if you order them. It's also popular to have drones do roleplay. LARP is generally very popular in Zmavlimu'e. Gifit went to one that was organized based on seasonal meets a while back. 

Domesticated animals are a thing, like chickens, sheep and cattle. There are no domesticated beasts of burden, because you can use drones for that. Sure, drones are weaker, but you could just use multiple, and, here's the important bit: drones can be toilet-trained.

There are no domesticated animal companions. Why would you want to let an animal inside your house, who will piss and shit and shed fur everywhere and not obey orders. Why not just buy a pretty drone and take care of it, and it can also be taught to entertain and do tricks and also suck your dick. 

Drones are sapient just like people, but they have different distributions on mental ability. Drones have better episodic memory, self-insight (interpreted broadly), and spatial intelligence. Their novelty-seeking impulse is greatly dampened, and boredom for them is greatly dampened as well. They're worse at verbal intelligence, pattern matching, and lateral thinking.

Despite this, drones aren't people and aren't treated like them. This is because drones don't have complex terminal desires – their terminal desires are few and stable, and basically cash out to 'serve and obey their Controller and make Them happy', which necessarily means that drones will always consent to what their Controllers ask from them. 

Gifit will interject here that usually drones use deferent pronouns to refer to their Masters, but that he aesthetically disliked this and preferred standard personal pronouns to be used by his drones for him. 

Drones are capable of feeling sensory qualia, but their capacity to have likes and dislikes about specific sensory qualia are greatly dampened, much like with boredom. A drone can tell you that something tastes sweet, but wouldn't be able to tell you whether it liked it or not. You could maybe wrench a preference out of it, but only after half an hour of prompting and comparisons with other stimuli, and explicitly telling it not to consider its model of its Controller. Asking the drone about its Master's desires is a very simple matter, though, and if the drone cooks for its Controller, it would be able to tell you with good accuracy whether He would like it.]

To confirm: It is not the case that Gifit's drones are for maximizing their/his inclusive genetic fitness such that they will be upset if he does not have reproduction-capable children anytime soon. Even if they were for maximizing inclusive genetic fitness he supposes they might not be too impatient, given immortality. It is not the case that drones find a lifestyle of hard labor they capture nearly none of the value from undesirable and are deceiving their Controllers about this. Also, setting aside preferences, do drones find their existences pleasant? Griffith leans somewhat towards preference utilitarianism when he's thinking about ethics, but hedonics do intuitively seem morally relevant to him.

[Nope! Evolutionarily that would make sense, but their eusociality developed before they had like, sapience, so it's operating on hard-wired instinct rather than cold calculation about kin relatedness structures. His drones will continue to serve him even if he says he's never going to have children.

Gifit will add that it's possible for drones to transition into Keepers and vice versa. Drones can transition into Keepers if they've been left Controllerless for months, and Keepers through a similarly long process of torture and humiliation, but that this change is both physiologically and psychologically traumatic, such that fewer than one in six drones will survive the process with both their body and mind intact. The latter process way way less likely to work, since they'll probably die of injury before then. The former process was adaptive because in the case where a hive lost its Controller, all of those drones would just have been wasted. With this process, probably at least one drone would succeed and become a Keeper, and become the new Keeper of the hive – successfully expressing the correct pheromones will suppress the transition in the rest.

Nowadays that never happens because people have wills which bequeath their drones to other people if they die – in the case someone dies without one (which is basically never) – it will escheat to the provincial government.

It is indeed not the case. Drones are okay with hard labor and would never deceive their Controllers. Unless, of course, if ordered.

Most drones would say it doesn't matter whether or not their existences are pleasant, only that their Controller's is. Or that their lives are pleasant if their Controller's is.

Gifit will say that caring about your drones' welfare to an extent greater than that of 'keep them healthy so they're productive' is kind of unseemly and that a significant number of people would say you should go to a therapist to get that corrected.]

A drone arrives and says that there's a message from Sir Damin. Damin wants to confirm whether Gifit is still available, because he plans to visit. [Damin is one of Gifit's friends, and visits about a dozen times a year.]

"Tell Damin the following: I am still available, but have experienced some drastic nonnegative mental changes. Thus, your expectations about my behavior may be incorrect, so if you have a very specific idea of how visiting me will go, you may be disappointed."

Why is it 'unseemly' to care about drone welfare, anyway? What are the effects of acting in an unseemly manner, and what else is unseemly?

The drone says, "Yes, Controller," but stays there. It will remain until Griffith says it's dismissed. He hasn't propagated the order to the rest of the drones.

[It's unseemly because it's like caring about what a spoon feels, or what a cow feels. Spoons and cows aren't people. 

Acting in an unseemly manner will probably make people dislike associating with and interacting with you. 

Many things, but it's kind of...instinctual? One of the native moral atoms of Zmavlipre is beauty vs ugliness – 'unseemliness' taps into that. If it feels ugly, then it's unseemly. People do have different views on what is unseemly and not, but usually people converge on certain things most people would think of as ugly.]

"Once you have done this, tell my other drones that they are not to require explicit verbal dismissal if they are capable of using their judgement to determine when I am ready for them to leave. Now go."

Griffith paces around the garden area. Does this place just not have the concept of wanting experiences in general to be pleasant and preferable being expressable as a semi-coherent philosophy as opposed to a personal quirk? Is it not intuitive why someone would care about keepers and drones and cows and wild animals but not about spoons or rocks? The drones are at least not an obvious disaster. Possibly the animal agriculture is not an obvious disaster either: There are non-animal-welfare costs to many forms of farming that are detrimental to animal welfare, and people here are immortal and don't care about cheap meat for the worker caste. This may mean they don't do concentrated feedlots or such, because of disease risk. What is the state of animal agriculture here, anyway?

"Yes, Master," it says again, bowing, then leaves.

[Nope! They have game theory, and aesthetic theory, but not...ethics? They also don't seem to have the concept of moral obligation? They have the concept of doing something because it's beautiful, efficient, powerful, coherent, or truthful, and likewise opposing something because it's the opposite of those values (ugly, wasteful, weak, dissonant, or false), but don't really have the concept of like...doing something because it's 'Evil'. (They also don't have the concept of Evil.) Or generally 'bad' which doesn't touch upon any of those moral atoms. 

Animal agriculture is actually quite good! Animals are permitted lots of space to roam around in, are kept clean, and tend to have enrichment, since, unlike Earth, labor is extremely cheap! You can have drones watch over your animals. Also, people care aesthetically about where their food comes from and would disprefer meat they found out came from animals which were kept overcrowded and in filth – it triggers disgust around bad smells and disease, even at that remove. People generally care about metaphysical qualities of things here more than Earth.

Ranchers also prefer that their animals not be kept in filth and overcrowding or simply ugly and bare environments because it's generally unpleasant to have said ugly things in your property, so even if Zmavlipre were able to ignore the metaphysics, it would still most likely be the case.

People do care about their drones getting some meat to prevent deficiencies but it doesn't have to be tasty meat. Zmavlipre buy offcuts and offal in bulk to feed drones with, with the Keeper getting the good parts – indeed it's common for butchers to have whole cows ready, and only slaughter them once an order comes in, since the Keeper would buy the whole cow after processing, save for things like the skin, which would be sold to a tanner. (Unless the Zmavlipre runs a leather business, hah.)]

A while into Griffith's pacing, the same drone returns.

"Sir Damin said that 'he would love to talk about these changes' and 'is now more interested in coming.' Sir Damin says he plans on coming tomorrow afternoon, staying the night, and leaving the next day." [This is common practice when visiting faraway friends and is something Damin has done many times before at Gifit's place.]

Is it appropriate to send Damin some reply of the form "acknowledged, I plan to see you when you arrive"? If so, Griffith will have a drone do that.

It's annoying that Earth had enough pressing problems and disinterest in actually working hard towards one's ethical values that the state of knowledge around animal welfare is really, really bad. It's also annoying that he was almost entirely too busy or otherwise occupied to engage with the literature. Improving things here, if there are viable improvements which he's not sure there will be, is going to take a while no matter what.

Some of Griffith's peers have said that the avertable badness on Earth was in some ways analogous to the avertable badness of a building fire with people stuck in the building. This does not, actually, appear to be the case here, at least by Griffith's intuitive metrics and the knowledge base he currently has. It's nice.

He'll head back inside and look for a writing desk. And start mentally drafting changes to Gifit's house, if he's going to be here a while. Perhaps he would prefer more indoor plants.

Yes, it would be appropriate. The drone who bore the message will send that.

Gifit's bedroom has a writing desk. [Griffith will also know that it's rather uncommon to write things directly. Usually, you have drones take dictation for you in shorthand, which they will then write in longhand or, more popularly nowadays, type with a typewriter.]

What changes does he want to make? [Gifit's main house is relatively small, as main houses go, especially since he decided to have the drones live separately. This is not always the case, especially when they own fewer drones: you save on heating costs this way, and it's less friction to check on them. Heating is not that necessary because winter doesn't go below freezing, but there are cold snaps where it does, which occur infrequently. Also, it's generally considered good to be in close proximity with your drones – not just because of instinct, but because you want your drones to be exposed to your pheromones. It's considered a good idea to sleep with your peripheral drones every once in a while, in both senses of the phrase.]

Griffith is going to start writing miscellaneous things he has memorized down in English, with space for phonetic annotation if he feels like doing so (or having someone else do it) later. Some songs, including one about being out in the rain. A bunch of poems, including "On Seeing a Photograph by Matthew Brady" and a lot of grooks. (He likes memorization more than average, but mostly does it recreationally.) Also some examples of math notation, which isn't really English but is maybe relevant. (Does he want his drones to learn the Latin alphabet? Unclear and not urgent.)

He's not really sure what changes he wants made to the house. He's a fan of colorful geometric mosaics and sunlight and houseplants, but it's not like the status quo is bad. Also, having sex with drones sounds awkward and tedious and vaguely wrong-for-him, but is maybe better than it sounds.

…huh. It's been a while. He should probably eat. Do food preferences go with the body or the mind? What does Gifit normally like eating?

Imperial math notation is kind of better because it's been designed from the ground up, but he can totally write down Earth language and Earth math notation if he wants to.

[Colorful geometric mosaics can be had for cheap, since Kosfor City has Art Nouveau aesthetics and so he'll be able to find many local sellers and builders to renovate his house, and probably for cheaper than if he decided he wanted a different aesthetic. Gifit's memories of having drones with sex range from pleasant to very pleasant. Gifit is kind of vanilla when it comes to that – other people want elaborate scenes. Gifit also had a low sex drive compared to the median Zmavlipre, which kind of brings him around the level of 'forty year old man' rather than 'twenty year old man'.

The house lets some sunlight in but it's not optimized for that. Sadly you would need to radically reconfigure it if you want to have maximal sunlight penetration – there are certain builders and styles which specialize in this. It's not an uncommon preference in Zmavlimu'e.

Kind of both? People get specific cravings for food if their body says they want a specific nutrient – paying attention to this is a subset of body control – but also people just inherently like certain foods. Gifit is close to the median in Zmavlipre tastes: he likes sweet and salty, dislikes sour and acid, likes dairy products, likes alkaline foods, dislikes dry foods.

It's currently early spring now, and still somewhat chilly, so Gifit would probably eat some sort of warm soupy/brothy type dish, followed by a similarly warm dessert. 

It's typical for people to have their drones prepare meals at set times, and for them to set menus beforehand, often at the start of the day, but Gifit kind of has an irregular desire-to-eat schedule, so he doesn't have his drones cook unless he says so.]

He'll request a somewhat ramen-like dish on the basis that Gifit liked it, Gifit was eating food that wasn't terrible nutritionally, the ingredients should likely be in stock, and it sounds good to him.

Warm desserts are typical? What sort of warm dessert, is this more a reheated pie slice or a freshly made molten chocolate cake or what? Drones presumably don't eat desserts so there's not much economy of scale except temporally or if a household is entertaining.

Do they have the microwave oven? The microwave oven works with, uh, something like radar but he doesn't really know how radar works, inch-or-so length light waves, right, something about them being good at heating water? He should maybe try to provide technological input at some point. Anyway, reheating food existed before the microwave oven, he's pretty sure, so even without the microwave oven the standard thing might be to reheat something.

At some point he should test whether he still likes pickles in this body, but not right now.

They have dishes very similar to ramen or alkaline pasta dishes in broth here! The drones will go do that. It will come out very similar to Japanese ramen, except the broth is clear and lighter rather than opaque. [Usually it's richer and opaque, but Gifit preferred the lighter version.] There will be garlic, pepper, other spices he can't immediately identify, and thinly sliced beef. [Pork is a thing, but it's not as popular as on Earth.]

Not exactly? [There are desserts at a warm range of temperatures – hot, tepid, and cold. Imperial orthodox culinary theory says to serve food that is of the opposite temperature as the ambient one. It's cold now, so hot foods ought to be served. Tepid (room temperature) foods can be served at any time.

Examining Gifit's memories will reveal that he likes, and often orders these hot desserts: brown sugar rice pudding, which might have other grains like corn added in, potentially with cinnamon or saffron; the same, but with red beans and less milk; coconut cream soup with starchy vegetables and fruits, like taro, banana, tapioca spheres, and jackfruit, flavored with pandan; rock sugar soup with glutinous rice balls, potentially with fillings of toasted sesame seeds. (Griffith might recognize these as very similar to payasam, hongdou tang, bubur cha cha / sampelot, and tang yuan, if he's had or seen those before.)

He doesn't really like baked desserts, but there is an oven. Zmavlipre kind of prefer wet or moist dishes to dry ones, in general.

People care a lot about their food, both in the taste and in the presentation. Probably because you have drones to cook for you, but Gifit's memories say that many Zmavlipre also love cooking and do it themselves – though of course when it's time to clean and wash dishes, the drones do that.]

[They know that certain types of electromagnetic radiation can heat materials, so they have the theoretical basis for it, but no one has put in the effort to engineer one. 

The drones will not reheat things. It won't be fresh anymore afterwards – the drones eat any leftovers. By reheating food you are figuratively taking the food out of the drones' mouths the drones also cook their own food – one person's leftovers is not enough to feed several dozen remna.

The desserts will kind of take a while to cook – with the rice ball dish the drones have already prepared and frozen the rice balls so it's faster; normally you don't do that but Gifit doesn't tell the drones what to cook in advance – but the ramen will be quick and the dessert comes afterward, so it works out.

They do have the concept of the refrigerator, but it's kind of inefficient and bad? And it consumes kind of a lot of electricity by their standards. They're working on better ones. For now, what they do is import ice from the southern provinces, which are colder, as well as the Antarctic, and then store the ice in cellars to be used year-round. They only use that ice for chilling – they don't use it directly in cooking, it's dirty. This is a subtropical climate, so it usually doesn't get cold enough for water bodies to freeze and ice harvested from them.]

The soup isn't bad, though it could stand to have more vegetables and maybe an egg.

Since when does corn go in rice pudding – no, corn pudding-like stuff is good too, the combination isn't obviously insane. Red bean paste is good. Are whole red beans good? Probably, but maybe not what he wants today. He'll order the coconut cream soup, since there weren't enough vegetables in the noodle soup.

He feels a bit like he's mistakenly slipped into a cognitive frame where he's treating Gifit's estate like a restaurant with a menu. He could demand the red beans be made into a paste. The only block is that he doesn't actually know how red bean paste is made. Well, it's extremely nonurgent.

He has imported ice because he's in an alternate Analogous-To-Gilded Age. Weird. Probably this place doesn't have CFC problems yet – those are chlorofluorocarbons, right? The space of refrigerants with all three of those elements is the concerning thing? Maybe he can preempt that cluster of problems.

The usual soup has that, but [Gifit didn't like those in there, so they weren't put in.]

The red bean soup usually has half of the red beans be mashed, and the others left whole, so that you both have a thick soup but also Textural Heterogeneity. The coconut cream soup can be had. [Gifit loves dessert] so there will be kind of a lot of soup? Actually, all the portions have been kind of a lot – it would be enough to feed like, two humans. It's just right in this body, though. The dessert might be too much, but only in the sense that it's too-'rich'-such-that-you-tire-of-it-and-need-an-opposing-flavor*. In the case that happens, the drones will offer dried salted sardines. [This is a common opposing-flavor-food for creamy sweet dishes, since it's light and salty.]

[Red bean paste is made by boiling the beans, and then mashing them.]

[Sadly, Gifit is neither a chemist nor an engineer, so his memories won't be of much help. His memories indicate that Damin has a chemist and industrialist friend, Xaber, who he's close with.]

* Two syllable word in Standard Imperial. They have a lot of taste and smell qualia words.

Well, he clearly ought to try the sardines. There are not prewritten guidelines for waking up in the body of an alien aristocrat but if he were writing them, “try weird things the alien likes if they don’t seem objectionable” would definitely go on the list.

The issue isn’t Gifit’s memories, it’s Griffith’s. Which are full of keywords that point to Wikipedia articles he doesn’t have access to. He probably wants an introduction to Xaber (and how formal are introductions here, anyway?) if he can convince Damin he’s an alien in Gifit’s body. Since people don’t just believe statements here.

After dessert, he has a drone take a lot of notes for him on his memories, while they’re fresh.

The sardines are sharply salty and crunchy, which is a pleasant contrast to the creamy soft sweetness of the soup. The drones don't offer many sardines, since it's meant to be there purely to dispel the too-rich sensation, and not to be a course or dish in and of itself – [although there are true dishes which incorporate it.]

[Introductions are informal! You basically just ask the mutual friend to introduce you, which is considered a minor to moderate favor, since they're staking their reputation on it. You are asking the mutual friend to vouch for your good-faith and your worthiness-to-interact-with. However, Gifit's memories indicate that Damin will probably agree to introduce him even if he doesn't explain, because Damin likes to make introductions. He kind of fancies himself a matchmaker – both romantically and platonically.]

The drone will take dictation for Griffith, but Griffith will have to say them all in Imperial, because the drone doesn't know English. Afterward, the drone will ask whether Griffith wants the shorthand to be written out in longhand, or typed, and how many copies to produce.

He sort of figured introductions between slow-paced aristocrats would be more complicated than this, but this works.

His memory dump is going in Imperial, yes. The drone can handle some phonetic transliteration, and at a few points he'll write some symbols himself. Given this, he'd like a longhand rewrite because presumably the typewriter does not have Latin letters. He wants whatever Gifit remembers as being a normal number of copies for an important diary-entry-ish thing, he's not accustomed to having a personal paper archive.

The drone will write it down in longhand, and will copy the symbols with exacting accuracy, including the size at which Griffith writes the symbols.

[The normal number of copies for a diary entry is just one, which would be locked in a safe which has his valuables, like firearms, gold, jewelry, and important or secret documents. It's in his bedroom, actually! The code is 112999.]

Alright, sure, one copy for now.

He'll continue enjoying the lifestyle of a rich immortal with good senses (meals, bathing, probably a personal concert if that's a thing, fancy bed), put food on a schedule so he doesn't forget it, and generally pass time enjoyably until Damin shows up.

There is a large-by-Griffith but small-by-Gifit-standards bathtub. [Zmavlipre love bathtime and big bathtubs. This bathtub which could fit more than one person in it is considered 'average' – and it's not just because Zmavlire'a are bigger than humans on average.]

A few of Gifit's drones are trained in singing, and they can sing for him.

Day 2

Damin will arrive with six drones on a carriage, which is giving a rococo aesthetic, except with yellow and blue as the main colors rather than yellow and white. Two drones are pulling the carriage – with their replacements in the back when they get tired – with two attending to him directly.

He's going to go up to the gate, whereupon one of Griffith's drones will let them pass through, since it has been told to expect them.

Damin will ride all the way up to near the front of the house, where he will park the carriage and wait for either Griffith himself or one of his drones to attend to him. 

He's wearing a similarly blue and yellow patterned garment seemingly made of a few long pieces of cloth draped and wrapped around the body, like a sari. His drones are wearing similar wraps, but only on their torsos – they're wearing regular pants.

Griffith will personally greet Damin, and is wearing something nice from Gifit's wardrobe. He'll do whatever generic greetings are appropriate and then offer to summarize the drastic psychological changes he's experienced unless Damin wants to say something else first.

The generic greetings will be had, and since Damin was going to ask the usual smalltalk questions anyway, he will agree to hear about Gifit's 'drastic psychological changes'. He's a therapist, so he's very interested!

"We should probably go inside before you tell me that your entire personality has been inverted or something."

They can head inside, sure. It's not like there's anyone who isn't them or their drones around to eavesdrop, though.

"My experiences are thus: I was until yesterday an alien, of a casteless dioecious senescence-prone species incapable of lying, and then I through an unknown mechanism woke up in Gifit's body with some access to his memories. Associated with this is a language I don't remember generating including poetry within that language, detailed memories of alien biology as relevant to longevity research, and so on. Since you don't just believe things people say to you I'm not sure that I can produce adequate evidence to convince you of much."

Damin will sit down before hearing what Griffith has to say.

"...yeah. This is indeed not. And you speak...so differently from Gifit. What was your name in your alien world?

The hypothesis I'm working under is that you're being mildly inconsiderate and are in a very elaborate LARP*, which you failed to talk to me about. I know you used to go to one of the seasonal LARP groups."

* Three syllable word in Standard Imperial.

"Griffith Young. I could show you my writing in English and we could see if there's a path to test whether I just came up with a conlang or not? I went for stuff I recreationally memorized but I could translate some document out of Imperial Standard."

"Interesting. Some of those phonemes aren't in Imperial. It would be transliterated as 'Grifit Ian', or perhaps 'Grifix Iyn'.

I don't think there's a path? Many people make naturalistic conlangs.

Hm. Okay. So. My model of Gifit is that he's not going to pull a LARP on me without telling, and that this is really out of character for him. This makes me more inclined to believe you. On the other hand, your situation breaks very established laws of physics and I'll have to like, throw away my entire world view. Which I very well might need to do, mind you.

I'm...deciding to take what you say at face value, especially since like, the situation doesn't seem to me as dangerous enough that I'll have to put in more effort into verifying your claims. Your situation is functionally identical to if you underwent a simple drastic personality shift with added worldbuilding." He smiles.

"How's life in your new body, Griffith?"

"Well, I keep being surprised by things: The typical keeper here is a lot wealthier on non-technological-advancement dimensions than the typical person on Earth is, the lifestyle I can afford to lead here isn't available to most people there, but I also don't have a portable electronic computer capable of storing gigabytes of data and playing music. There's some philosophies which place positive or negative value on actions or character traits or worldstates on an axis that's common to track on Earth but doesn't get tracked much here. Apparently it's unseemly that I would prefer people not torture their cows out of concern for the cows, though my memories suggest animal agriculture conditions are adequate here and a sadist would much prefer to torture drones over animals, so my nonstandard preferences here might not affect my near-term actions much. There is an entire art form around counterfactual scenarios and I am pretty excited by this."

"Also, the body itself is unfamiliar to me, and I'm not sure how long it'll take me to fully adjust. I like not worrying about senescence and having a better sense of smell, but sometimes things feel too small or I expect to have hair, and in my past I was taking cross-sex hormones which I can't do here. I also enjoyed some dry and acidic foods, but I don't know if this body is capable of enjoying them, it's not species-typical. …it is really weird how familiar so much of the ecosystem here is, I'd have expected aliens to be a lot less similar to my species."

"I don't have many prompts to do things. In the past I was focused a lot on not dying, but now that seems a lot less likely, and it'd be normal for me to just hang around not doing things, but I'm not sure I endorse that. I have a few concerns about possible atmospheric composition problems we might have in the future, which I'd like to bring to the attention of whoever's appropriate, but I was never a chemist or a physicist and I know more names than full working models, I didn't get to bring a library."

"Ah, Earth is the name of your civilization? Or home planet? Wealthier in which respects?

Interesting! You must have way better mechanical and electrical engineering. Do you remember any schematics? If you do, you could probably make a lot of money.

Yeah...no one really tortures cows? Why would you want to do that. Torture drones instead – they have more satisfying pain responses. I would imagine that a culture...no...species which doesn't have the concept of lying wouldn't have fiction. I feel so sorry for you. I'm glad you'll be able to experience that now. Also, I'm wondering how exactly not being able to comprehend lying was a stable equilibrium for your species – it seems so fragile – but whatever.

So your previous species was senescent, and was also...sexually dimorphic? Is that right? Yes, many people enjoy dry and acidic foods – just not most of them. Probably if your personality changed your tastes also changed. 

Yes, our society is very peaceful now, and diseases are less of a thing now that we have better medicine. Not zero of a thing, though. And of course, accidents happen. I mean, if you just wanted to chill here and farm for the next gross years, that's fine. Many people do that their entire lives. That's kind of what I'm doing aside from my side therapy thing.

What do you mean by atmospheric composition problems. That sounds Concerning."

"Earth is my home planet. It contained multiple polities without a single planetary government, I'm from the Fractious States of America. I don't think I remember schematics but I have some remembered information that might be useful if someone else did a lot of work with it. People on Earth tortured animals mostly for non-sadistic reasons, they wanted to produce abundant meat even if it was more likely to be contaminated and the farms were extremely unaesthetic and the process created disease-risk externalities. And then sometimes people who were working in the industry would hurt an animal because it was nearby and they could get away with doing so and they were stressed. Yes, my species was sexually dimorphic."

"My atmospheric composition concerns are as follows: In addition to obvious pollutants produced by combustion of coal and oil and such, carbon dioxide is also released, and over the long term its accumulation can cause the atmosphere to retain more heat, altering the climate. Furthermore, there's a class of refrigerant chemical containing chlorine, fluorine, and carbon ­… I think that's what it was, 'chlorine' and 'carbon' start with the same letter in English and I mainly remember the chemical by acronym … and it can cause damage to ozone. Which you might think would be fine, because you probably don't want to breathe ozone, but actually there's a layer of it in the upper atmosphere reducing ultraviolet light exposure, and if it gets damaged such as by refrigerant leaks, then you can end up with excess UV light."

Damin laughs when Griffie says 'Fractious States of America'. 

"Okay, so your people can't lie, but can't they...omit things? Couldn't it just called itself the 'States of America'? I'm kind of amazed that a country would willingly call itself that. 

...I'm confused. Do your animals produce more meat under torture? If I whip a cow it's going to spend energy healing the wound rather than making more meat and milk. Which is why I don't. Do animals on Earth work differently?

Ahh, we've had coal and oil power for more than a gross years now, but I don't think we've noticed that. Then again, we've deliberately stopped building more coal and oil plants because the smoke is awful. We're relying on geothermal, wind, and hydropower, and are looking into nuclear fission and solar. We're kind of bottlenecked on energy and there's a political battle over making tradeoffs regarding coal and oil power and our energy needs – this has been alleviated somewhat by people figuring out how to filter the smoke that removes most of the bad stuff. Though really, if you want to talk chemistry, you should talk to Xaber.

I don't know what chemical you're referring to, but I am familiar with the ozone layer, yes. Who knew that Xaber's infodumps would actually be useful." He laughs again. 

"We're bad at omitting things. The capacity to do it is something I'm getting used to."

"If you put animals in highly cramped conditions, you can have more animals per unit land, and then if they harass each other due to the cramped conditions you can surgically modify them to be less capable of it and also just tolerate a lot of them harassing each other, and you can do selective breeding for accelerated growth at the cost of a near-certainty of injuries. So I guess the animals that are bred for unhealthy growth acceleration do produce more meat under bad conditions, sort of, but mostly it's more indirect than that."

"I probably want to talk to Xaber about chemistry. I know that photovoltaic panels are possible, and I've seen some and could try to sketch them, but I don't know how they work, and I know some stuff about productive fission plants but not a lot."

"I would not survive as someone from your world. I would die of embarrassment.

Interesting. I could see that happening for chickens, but not for cattle – part of the reason you want cattle is so that they can convert inedible grass into edible meat and milk. In your scenario you would have to spend a lot of labor cutting up grass and bringing it to them to eat, or feeding them actual food, which seems counterproductive. In any case, people don't like the idea of the animals that will be their food to live in perpetual dirtiness.

I can introduce you, if you want. Um...you can do what you want, but I wouldn't suggest opening with 'I'm from another world, actually' because he'll think you're crazy. I'll just say that you've developed a passion for chemistry and have been reading and thinking about some interesting things.

Xaber has talked to me about photovoltaics, but currently the best prototypes for solar power are heliostat towers where you use mirrors to focus rays to heat water, which then drives turbines. He would probably love any information you could give about fission plants."

"Cattle often get fed maize and soy, I think. I really doubt people were doing this without it being profitable to them, but the Fractious States had some archaic farm subsidies that affected the price off maize, and it didn't properly tax the farmers for the externalities they produced or make it easy to sue over them. A majority of people there prefer eating meat over eating soy and I expect there was less demand than here for price-optimized food that doesn't appeal to the senses at all, a lot of cheap food appealed to the senses at the cost of nutrition."

"Regarding fission: What do you think the state of the world would be like if some weapons technology existed which was feasible for large organizations such as governments to use to significant destructive effect? My information on nuclear fission suggests it's kind of entangled with that. It intuitively seems like a unified world government wouldn't have problems with such a thing being possible, as they could regulate it and not get into an arms race, but I'd like your opinion."

"Also, I can try not to open that way to Xaber, but I'm not sure how to explain things like 'I'm really sure that there exists a working photovoltaics design which would have these visual properties' without the relevant context. I suppose I could abstain. I also feel that if somehow Gifit gets back, being less than fully open about my status is doing him a disservice, but everyone I've talked to so far seems to just be assuming that it's fine for me to socialize with his friends and enjoy his farm and drones and such."

"Yeah, maize and soy are the things we would feed to ourselves or our drones. Your land must be really productive to be able to feed both your species and your cattle – you are omnivorous, yes? Ah, you probably use chemical fertilizer, no? Xaber discovered a new way of making that that's more efficient. He's still refining the process but it would be a very good thing for the state of our agriculture.

Ah, I'm not sure how your taxation scheme is back there, but here we just use land value tax. There were proposals for other types of tax, but land value tax is what we converged on as fulfilling many desiderata: being hard to evade, requiring less legibility to the state, being easy for people to measure and pay, etc.

Yes, we would want food to both be appealing and nutritious, though for drones you only care about the latter. Speaking of which, we should have dinner." He chuckles.

"You don't need to explain – you could bet money, or pay him to research it for you.

I'm fine with it because I can't really distinguish between 'Gifit was replaced by an otherworldly entity' and 'Gifit had a personality change and also was doing a bunch of extra reading' – he was one of my friends but we weren't that close. And even if the former was true, what could I do about it? It's not like I know of a mechanism to bring him back, and I'm not going to kill you or harm you over it – both because he might return, and because this seems totally accidental."

"It is accidental. I tried contacting the medical advice service Gifit was paying for about it, in case there was something time-sensitive they could do for him, but they didn't have any particular insight."

"Some people at home say land value tax would be better, but implementing it would effectively be similar to a government declaring ownership of all the land, which would not be well-received by large land owners and some other groups, and so it doesn't happen. There are income taxes, payroll taxes which are just income taxes but paid by the employer, sales taxes, property taxes which account for value of a house and not just the land it's on, and some others. Paying taxes is complicated and tedious in part because a vendor of tools to help with tax calculation lobbies for it to be that way and politics are a huge mess."

"We do use chemical fertilizer. Some people do use non-synthetic fertilizers at home but all the cheap food uses synthetics, we have a population of several billion. Though they eat less than people here. If I discuss chemical fertilizers in conversation with you without prenegotiating a profit-sharing agreement will you rush ahead of me to use the information I gave? Also, betting is an interesting idea, it's mostly a thing that happens among people who like risk for its own sake and a small community of people who think it's an intellectual tool worth exploring at home."

"Ah, but the government here does have ownership of all the land – the Imperator took over several gross years ago and occupied everything. People would revolt if income taxes were a thing. Likewise with sales taxes. That would require making your income sources and what you buy and sell legible to the government. Which is...triggering to our instincts regarding feeling exposed and vulnerable and out in the open.

What is lobbying?

Er, no, because I don't really have a chemical business? And would probably take a dozen years or more to get going – and I would not want to put in that much work. Probably do that with Xaber, though? You can make a partnership with him that will get you a portion of the profits, or contract with him to be a consultant.

Yes, betting is showing that you think something is actually true, in a way that gives you skin-in-the-game – you're incentivized to get it right, because otherwise you'll lose money. They call those prediction markets. They're way more popular now, now that we have better communications technology, but not everyone participates. There have been proposals to integrate it into government, but none have panned out yet.

As for weapons technology, well, the Imperium is really the only major polity here? I don't think the independent stateless people have the industrial capacity to build such a thing, if it's cutting-edge tech. Probably everyone would be really anxious for a while but then realize that killing each other is wasteful, and not do that. That's basically what the Imperator taught us – although he had to either kill or exile all the people who thought that killing was more important than non-wastefulness."

"So, in the Fractious States, people tend to notice that legislators have to make a lot of decisions such that they can't fully focus on giving their best judgement to every decision. So if an organization cares really strongly about a policy, they'll hire people to do stuff like offering the legislators expensive meals together where they talk about the organization's perspective on the policy, with the idea being that if the legislator is too tired to do a lot of original research or pay a lot of attention they'll be biased towards the organization's views, I think. Politics was never my focus."

"The weaponization capacity of fission would be pretty cutting-edge, yes. People sometimes act as though 'you could get some radioactive material and, without that much technology, use it to make a mess' is in the same reference class as 'you could get some radioactive material and, with a lot of technology, use it to make a very powerful bomb' but I don't think that's a reasonable classification scheme and I would expect that people already know things like 'if you dumped hazardous substances on other people's property you could cause problems for them'. It's not a very complicated concept."

"Prediction markets are mostly illegal in the Fractious States for convoluted reasons that you probably aren't interested in and won't be impressed by, I'm certainly not impressed."

"The memories of fertilizer that spring to mind are that you need to balance nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Ammonia … I think is a simplistic nitrogen molecule, possibly present in urine, can be used as an explosive in addition to a fertilizer, and there's something about synthesizing it under extreme pressure I think? And there's better phosphorus sources than bat guano, I think it gets mined at home, but in a context of abundant phosphorus people complain about phosphorus runoff causing algae overgrowth in lakes and such. I don't think I remember that much about potassium that's agriculture-relevant at least right now."

"Wow. America needs better legislators. But we also probably don't have the huge organizations you seem to be implying.

Mmhmm. It would be useful if like, aliens come, I guess. I don't know. I know a lot about politics: both my parents were politicians, but I know nothing about the military. Konrad would be interested.

...see, now you're tempting me to ask, but I'm also really hungry now. My drones are probably eating with your drones now, so I should eat with you. I'll have whatever you're having.

Yes, Xaber's process involves compressing gases together in extreme pressure to make ammonia. Nitrogen is the limiting factor in many cases, though."

"I don't think advanced weaponry is particularly useful, I just don't want to accidentally enable it if it'll be a giant disaster. I don't like giant disasters and at home there was a long while of two states threatening each other with very powerful weapons that would cause a lot of collateral damage, which didn't end up getting used but it feels like a matter of luck that they didn't."

"And yes. I tried to have the drones serve food on a schedule because I'm not reliable at remembering to eat food when I'm focused, but I'm starting to think I didn't really make my reasoning for scheduled food clear, because I'm not getting food-related prompts."

"Hm, did you ensure your drones received your message? It might be better if you told them directly, or punished them for not getting you your food on time. I certainly would have. Alternatively, you can send your drones to be trained by Konrad – yes, this is me shamelessly shilling my boyfriend's business.

I like to be surprised, and my drones already know which dishes and pairings I like, so I have them roll dice to see which food they'll prepare, without telling me beforehand."

Griffith looks awkward. He tells the nearest drone to get them some food likely to appeal to his and Damin's tastes promptly and get the rest of dinner started, and then turns back to Damin, still looking awkward.

"I should have explained the reasoning there better, yes. I'm not really used to being in a position of power over others like this. …I also am inclined against the use of punishment. I'm used to contexts in which non-token punishments for sincere mistakes are mostly considered useless unless you feel vengeful or such, which I don't, and given the nature of drones I'd expect basically any behavior they do which I dislike to be a sincere mistake. And at least for now I'll be surprised by the majority of the food and can only guess at what I like. My guess is Gifit didn't make obviously unreasonable training choices – he had the aesthetic preference that they stand around until dismissed, which is very annoying to me but that's not really a mistake on his part."

The drone will do that!

"Why so? Punishment is traditional and robust, even if it might be a little imprecise or heavy-handed. Drones which receive only minimal training or bad training might get into...ruts...where they're too stuck into habits and don't correct themselves even when you explicitly say to Stop Doing That. So, you punish them – it's operant conditioning. Drones will never be averse to you, of course, because you're their Controller, so you can punish them as much as you want, although you shouldn't do it too much, because otherwise they might become too averse to doing the old thing.

I could teach you hypnosis if you want to do that without punishment, but punishment is fun, so like, why would you want to do that? You can punish drones even if they haven't done anything wrong, of course."

"I have an ingrained flinch reaction about hurting others. It's common for Earth children to go through a phase of hurting people when they're frustrated, and then at least in the culture I grew up in they get lots of lectures on why this is dispreferable. There are children's books with titles like 'Hands Mostly Shouldn't Hit'. As an adult, if I hit someone whose behavior I disliked, including someone I'd hired, this would be illegal. Historically, sometimes people did legally get to do that, but also sometimes people got in legal trouble even for fully consensual cases. That's mostly tangential. I have ever gone to clubs where people did things like consensual recreational punishment but it wasn't that fun. Possibly due to the lack of fiction, really. But even when I went to those clubs I wasn't interested in hurting people? And drones apparently aren't people and mine would enthusiastically cooperate with whatever I wanted and Gifit probably has memories about how to inflict nondamaging pain, but still, I am very much not in the habit. Also, it seems like it might be a private thing. Also my intuitive idea for what to do if I'm annoyed at someone and don't have objections on the more-common-on-Earth-axis to doing whatever I feel like is to yell, which might be annoying for you to overhear. Also I'm used to applying more effort and resources to get lower-quality food with worse timing, so I'm not really upset here."

"Really? Why would they get in legal trouble if it's consensual – they could just choose not to file a lawsuit. Or seal and notarize a contract absolving the other party of liability.

Oh. Are you the sort of person who likes getting hit, then?

It's not private, per se. There may be screaming and fluids which you do not want to inflict on people, so functionally it's sort of private.

I feel sorry for you, and I'm glad you're going to get to eat better food now."

"Assault isn’t considered a civil wrong in the Fractious States and other similar jurisdictions, it’s considered a criminal wrong. It gets prosecuted sometimes between consenting parties because third parties in or influencing the government disapprove, often because it’s part of a subculture they’d like to disrupt. For instance, they could think violence for sexual gratification among people who have sex with people of their own sex is disgusting, that’s happened in recent history. I am the sort of person who likes getting hit, including conveniently in this context by others of the same sex, which is probably why I heard about this particular incident. A more well-known phenomenon is that lethal dueling was banned in many jurisdictions, because the associated culture shamed many people – well, male people – for not dueling, which lead to higher death rates than a lot of people preferred."

"I am also glad I'm going to get to eat better food but I feel bad about being a poor host and I clearly need to catch up on Gifit's memories of managing this estate more."

"It's also a criminal wrong here, but like, the person who got hit could just choose not to prosecute? Even if a third party tried to prosecute the case, the hit-person could simply write an affidavit saying 'Actually it was consensual and I liked it so the case has no basis' and then the case will be dismissed. Hm. Prediction: your government prosecutes criminal law proactively, and on its own. Ours doesn't. Someone has to bring forth the case.

Interesting! Lots of Keepers also like that, but much fewer than those who are purely sadistic. Alternatively, you could train a drone to do it for you, but training a drone to be dominant is rather difficult – you'd need a professional trainer for that.

Hahah. I forgive you. I imagine it would be hard to host someone after waking up in an alien body."

Conveniently, a drone arrives with a bowl of fried chips made of leaf vegetables, and kowtows, apologizing profusely for the delay in dinner.

Griffith actively suppresses an instinct to say that he's broadly fine and everyone he knows of has off days, and just nods at the apology. Apparently aliens like leaf-vegetable chips? Hopefully they're better than the kale chips he remembers trying, at least with this mouth.

"The Fractious States is typical on Earth for prosecuting criminal law proactively, though historically your method was more common than it is on modern Earth. And I appreciate your understanding of my difficulties."

The leaf-vegetable chips will be crunchy, mildly salty and oily, and not bitter. 

Damin scoffs. 

"Oh come on. You're just going to let it go like that? This is why your drones don't obey you, Gifit – or rather, Griffith. Oh well. Do what you want – they're your drones.

Of course. I doubt I would have done much better, myself."

"My actions here are more in the direction you want than my reflexes! My reflexes can be modeled as thinking that I'm at a restaurant, and a person the restaurant employs is worried I'm going to make a complaint and try to get them fired due to an honest mistake that may not even have been on their part, so I should actively reassure them that I'm not upset and I'm not going to make a big fuss. I am not actually fully up-to-date on how Gifit handled this estate."

"What's 'firing'? I don't recognize that as a word in Standard Imperial. Oh, like...dismissing a contractor? Why would you want to hold back on complaining? I wouldn't. Of course you would want to dismiss contractors who weren't performing up to par.

I was friends with Gifit but I didn't really know the specifics. Nowadays, most people have a drone that acts as their secretary and helps them manage things. I believe Nam was the name of the drone Gifit had that did that. Have you talked to it? It can probably tell you what to do." 

"So! On Earth, the range of labor non-people can do is much more limited. So if you run an organization like a restaurant, you don't just need a skilled specialist for a temporary project like reworking your recipes or installing electrical systems or such, you need people who are willing to do tedious tasks that only take a few weeks to fully learn how to do, to ongoingly staff the restaurant. You probably don't want to pay them a lot of money, so you hire basically anyone who shows up and passes your screening questions. You probably don't even ask them if they use intoxicants while working because you can't afford to be picky. If you stop paying someone to staff your restaurant, I think it's probably because he's doing something egregious like theft, you've run low on funds, it makes you feel powerful, or it'll satisfy an angry customer. However, you can't actually afford to only have workers who never make mistakes! If you're running a high-end expensive restaurant, you can be pickier about workers, but when I go to a restaurant it's usually a cheap one. So if I demanded that a restaurant dismiss a worker who annoyed me by making a minor and reasonable mistake, this wouldn't actually improve the restaurant's performance because his replacement likely wouldn't do better, and it'd cause serious life disruptions to him. He'd likely have to find another source of income promptly to be able to afford to rent his current residence, which most people find unpleasant. So I and many other people consider it negative on the axis of stuff like general well-being and preference-satisfaction which Earth people talk about more than people here do to cause a worker to be dismissed over a mistake like that."

Damin eats the chips and makes satisfied expressions.

"Wow. Not having drones sucks. I hope Earth fixes itself. Not that that's relevant to us at this moment."

Dinner is ready!

There's steak, some sort of creamy pasta dish, and mango sorbet.

Damin smiles.

"Your drones clearly haven't been replaced by otherworldly visitors, because they remembered I like mango desserts. Alright. I forgive them for the late dinner now."

"Great! I remember liking some dessert of mango over sweetened sticky rice which was sometimes naturally purple, maybe that exists here or I can figure it out."

"When I was on Earth I was more concerned about the near-inevitable death of senescence problem than the unavailability of non-person labor in many fields, but I also was doing significantly better than the global and better than the local median in terms of personal income and wealth. I hope Earth fixes itself too. I was trying to help while I was there but there's not much to do here. I expect that if the Imperium develops a way to easily reach Earth, even though on Earth we thought there weren't any planets near us with atmospheric conditions and life like ours, they could trivially conquer Earth. I guess if you somehow end up giving advice on that please encourage people to not make a mess of it."

The mango sorbet will have very little acidity or tartness to it. It tastes like mango that has been magically stripped of sourness.

"Oh yeah. We have that here too – we put coconut milk on it.

I would be too, I bet. I couldn't imagine having a time limit on my lifespan.

I think we kind of grew out of the conquering phase, honestly. We would be more inclined to initiate trade with and immigration with Earth. That would probably put pressures on their governments and businesses to be better. We love having exit rights and choices. War is...wasteful, which is displeasing to us. Why fight when you can trade?

You're not really obligated to do anything. You can just farm. I suppose you could go into the medical industry if you really cared about making sure people don't die."

Damin seems to be enjoying the food.

"I can't rule out that the dish I remember involved coconut milk." And the current food is good.

"Regarding Earth: It would become extremely obvious to the Imperium that they wouldn't need to fight a war to conquer Earth, if it came to their attention. It has better weaponry, but you could say something like 'there was an election and it turns out we're the legitimate leaders of Earth, and if you oppose us we'll definitely make you regret it even if you think you're hard to deter' and people would believe you. Also, making trade and immigration agreements would likely be very frustrating to the Imperium. As it stands the Fractious States, which is among the largest and richest countries, tries to charge taxes on citizens who move to other countries and tightly restricts immigration, and most countries have a lot of convoluted individual restrictions on trade that vary based on product category, so you might conclude 'we can't reasonably trade with this government because it is insane' or such. Furthermore, drone-keeping potentially looks similar from an Earth-typical legal standpoint to forcing people to do labor, which is banned at least for non-criminals in most countries."

"Oh. Right." Damin looks abashed. "I forgot that like...your people don't understand lying. I'm like – I still haven't quite processed that fully, because of how unbelievably unstable that equilibrium is. I was thinking about like...military strategy and weapons technology."

Nom nom nom.

"Sigh.

Why would it forbid people from immigrating? Wouldn't immigrants pay tax? Our government officials are paid a percentage of both the revenue and profit of the government, so they're both incentivized to have as many taxpayers as possible and also to reduce government spending.

Well, see, the drone thing isn't as problematic as it might seem. You could totally give drones the same rights as people – it's just that they'll consent to everything their Controllers ask of them, and also give them all their property. It would work – we just don't do it because it's pointless."

"So! Some people want to reduce the rate of cultural drift, or have the polity they're in be composed of people more genetically or at least visually similar to them, or have less competition for jobs in their industry, and they care more about that than about the government getting tax income from immigrants. Furthermore, the Fractious States government offers various services to residents, which make immigration less obviously profitable. I think the Fractious States has good reasons for offering these services. For one, a lot of them are related to children. In a senescence-prone population, a functional society needs children to be produced regularly. Furthermore, without body-control, people can have children by accident. For reasons including these, the government runs programs for feeding children whose parents can't afford it, and running educational facilities for all children so that they have skills needed to participate in society, and such. So it's easy to get the impression that poorer immigrants would benefit from those programs more than they'd pay in taxes. When economists do studies, the studies suggest that immigration is good for the economy anyway, but there's various possible flaws in methodology that a study might have, and as mentioned, there are things people value which it's hard for economists to quantify."

"And I suppose giving drones legal rights could satisfy those legal requirements. People might be suspicious that you were privately threatening your drones, though. Which you apparently are. I suppose you could abstain or lie about it."

Damin sighs.

"Honestly, just hearing about your world makes me feel tired. I feel like asking more questions but I have the feeling that I will remain distinctly unsatisfied even after you explain.

Aside from introducing you to Xaber so you can talk chemistry with him, is there anything that I can do for you? So long as it's not costly, then it's a gift-with-no-expectation-of-repayment-not-even-with-the-expression-of-gratitude*. Otherwise, it will be a gift-with-expectation-of-repayment-with-future-favor-of-similar-value."

* Two syllable words in Standard Imperial.

"Accompany me through getting my bearings while you're here? I need to go over operations with Nam, look over the estate's finances so I can figure out what's available to spend on chemistry experiments, check if 'I've had a personality shift and prefer to be called Grifit for now' is a reasonable thing to say to people, check if there's anything Gifit particularly dispreferred that I should refrain from causing, and probably some other things I haven't realized yet. I have access to Gifit's memories but they're not as readily available to me as mine, they spring to mind when things related to them come up or when I go looking, but there's a lot of memories."

"I'll be happy to advise you on anything so long as I'm here – that's free. If you need me to stay longer than tomorrow noon, it will be a favor. You can contact me on the teletype network though. That's also free, but I might not respond immediately.

People do change personalities but usually not drastically. It's...rare but not unheard-of or highly weird for people to decide they want to suddenly refactor their lives or 'run away', so to speak. Socially speaking, you can just say you want to be called by a different name now, and they'll respect it. Usually. If you're sure about being called Grifit now, you should go to an Imperial notary in Kosfor and notarize and seal* an affidavit saying you want to change your name to something else. That's a formal document which businesses and institutions will accept. You'll have to pay one rupnu for the notary fee.

Xaber has a lot of money – he's an industrialist. If what you say seems promising, he might take you on as a consultant, make a partnership with you, or invest in you. Are you interested in starting a company to make money off of what you build? Or interested in just doing basic research?"

* [People use both signatures and personal seals/stamps to identify themselves, but the latter is considered to have higher weight. Gifit's seal is in his safe.]

"Your help is appreciated. I'll see whether I need to ask a favor of you, I guess."

"I like being called Grifith but the 'th' sound isn't standard here. I think I'll just say I prefer Grifith, or Grifit if one can't pronounce 'th', for now. I'll think about a legal name change later. Having more money seems nice but I don't know how much more work co-founding a company would be compared to just acting as a research consultant. And maybe if I'm lucky the stuff I remember about machine computers will be usable but not already-existing too, which isn't chemistry but would benefit from starting funds."

"You're welcome.

Yeah, some other languages have 'th', but not Standard Imperial. Co-founding a company is an order of magnitude more work, because you'll be expected to pool your drones together and train them and all that. That's why I haven't founded any and work by myself, hah.

Interesting. I'm not sure I have any friends specializing in machine computers. Currently, drone computers are better than machine computers, but machine computers seem like they'll scale better. If you successfully make a machine computer that surpasses a drone computer in some criterion – power consumption, speed, robustness against adverse conditions, versatility, or some other thing I can't think of – you'll be very rich."

"I'm used to being busier than the typical person here is used to being, I think? But I'm still inclined to try to get some kind of profit-sharing agreement that doesn't require that level of entanglement even if it means I get significantly less of the profit, if that's possible."

And he'll tell the nearest drone to send over Nam.

Damin laughs.

"Given that you don't have drones, I would think so. In that case, you'll probably prefer to ask Xaber to contract with you as an advisor, consultant, or researcher, and be paid in equity in his company rather than cash. That way, you won't be asked to pool drones. You'll receive an order of magnitude less money, but you said that was fine."

Nam will arrive. 

"Good evening, Controller. Good evening, Sir Damin," it says after bowing.

Good evening, Nam. "I am unfamiliar with operating this estate. Explain to me its workings." Please.

Acting like this is probably going to make Griffith's intuitive behaviors less appropriate for his home, isn't it.

"Yes, Controller. What aspects of the operation of this estate would you like this drone to describe? Or would you prefer a general overview?"

"I would prefer a general overview."

"Yes, Controller.

The estate's main crop is tea, of which there are five dozen acres. The estate processes the tea leaves to make black tea only.

Tea leaves are pruned by hand, and harvested by hand also, by careful plucking. There are three harvests for our type of tea: one in early to mid spring, and another in early summer, and the last in late summer. These are processed separately, and also packaged and sold separately, since they have different tastes.

After harvest, the leaves are dried indoors for hours, or overnight. Then, they are rolled and crushed, and then left to oxidize. Oxidation usually takes eight hours, but make take more or fewer depending on climactic conditions. Usually, you, Controller, would supervise in this step because the oxidation time has the largest effect on the taste of the tea, with regards to its processing. To stop oxidation, the tea leaves are placed in a very mild oven – in a temperature below water's boiling point – for a little less than half an hour. 

The tea leaves are sieved and sorted. Whole tea leaves are most desirable and will sell the best, whereas dust and fannings will sell for cheaper. We package these differently.

We do not blend our tea with other ingredients.

We purchase our packaging from Cenmin and Suras Food Packaging, which has a factory near Kosfor.

We sell our products wholesale to tea shops in Kosfor and other nearby cities. We do not sell our own tea in retail, although rarely there have been people who have come to the farm directly to buy from us. In this case we offer slightly cheaper prices.

Our products are registered with the Imperial Standards Authority and bears its seal on the packaging.

The first harvest in early spring will begin soon."

"What tasks of this estate besides tea oxidization do … did Gifit usually supervise? In particular, how did Gifit manage his drones? Tangent, I prefer to use the name 'Grifith', or 'Grifit' if the 'th' sound is infeasible. Consider it a medium-priority task for the household to learn this and a low-priority task for them to learn to pronounce 'th'. Additionally, suppose I have a mild preference for simplicity and derive no enjoyment from punishing drones. When discussing Gifit's management regime, note points at which it could be modified towards these preferences while continuing to function."

"Additional low-priority task, prepare to serve me a sampler of teas from this estate with details on production and commentary on the production's effects on the tea, including small samples of safe but undesirable batches if we have some around."

Griffith keeps glancing at Damin during this. This is how he's supposed to handle things, right?

"You, Controller, supervised all aspects of tea processing and cultivation to some degree, but the oxidation most intently. Usually, after the tea is processed, it would be tasted by you, so that you could determine whether or not the tea passes quality control standards. 

This drone apologizes, Controller: that question is very broad and this one does not know how to answer it to your satisfaction.

Your drones can be trained to pronounce 'th', Controller. 

Yes, Controller, samples of our tea can be procured. Sadly, there are no undesirable but safe batches, since those have all been composted."

Damin makes...a curious face when Griffith mentions punishment. He tilts his head slightly.

"You're really going in on the no punishment thing, huh? Do you mean only corporal punishment? 'Punishment' is very broad."

"I'm not necessarily going in on it! I just don't want to do things which are neither fun nor useful. I suppose it might be the case that it would be fun in some context that I have here but didn't have in the past, but I don't want to rely on that being true. I also don't have a good model of how one typically punishes one's drones, aside from generalizations from historic mistreatment of people and recreational agreements between people, which I expect to be underinformative."

"That makes sense. Corporal punishment is the most common type of punishment, which can either be you doing things to your drones – like whipping – or making them do various exercises. Konrad likes that one.

Alternatively you could ask it to humiliate itself, or beg for forgiveness, things like that. That's also fun.

If your drones are well trained enough, you could just say 'You did bad', and that will be aversive enough to them to count as meaningful punishment, as effective in operant conditioning as whipping them. Not as fun, though.

Ah, I should clarify my words, I've kind of been using them loosely: 'torture' is inflicting of bodily pain or discomfort on someone deliberately, while 'punishment' is merely causing aversive stimulus so that someone stops doing something. These two are very interrelated but are not equivalent. Is it that you are against torture but are fine with punishment?"

"I'm not against torture in the case of consenting people doing it recreationally or some other person doing it to their drones, I just anticipate not personally enjoying inflicting it. Though again, this anticipation could be incorrect, because I am in a very different environment with very different options. For instance, the option to order a drone to hurt itself was not previously salient to me, and I didn't expect drones to experience humiliation."

"Hah, yes. Sometimes I'm too lazy to punish my drones, so I have them do it themselves. It can be fun too. 

You know, that matter is actually up for debate – whether drones can meaningfully feel humiliation the same way Keepers do. Regardless of whether or not they can, it is still fun to see, externally, even if their internal experience might be different. It's like roleplay, in that way. I suppose for some people that diminishes the appeal. Does it to you?"

"I have never in my life observed a roleplay at the level of realism available to you. In the general case, roleplay does sound appealing. I don't expect the knowledge that something is a roleplay to significantly diminish my appreciation of it in the near term. Anyway, I don't need a drone-management plan to last me a duodecade yet, just something for the interim while I get my bearings."

"Right. Well, I think the fact that you don't have drones isn't the limiting factor, but the fact that like, your people can't lie. Which I would imagine hampers roleplay a lot.

That makes sense. If you're having trouble with your drones, you can always ask me for advice. That's a gift-without-any-expectation-of-repayment-not-even-with-the-expression-of-gratitude. I will charge money if you want me or Conrad to have your drone or drones come over and be trained."

"Yes, that was the point I was making."

"And I don't think I'm having trouble yet, in that things generally seem fine to me, but apparently I don't know how to handle them pretty much in full generality aside from telling them to do things I want, which seems like an indicator of impending trouble."

Sip of water.

"Yeah. I think...you have Gifit's memories, right? Whatever he says would work would probably still work. I can't really give better advice unless you ask a more specific question, because this is...commanding drones is like, a Keeper's job from birth. 'Telling them to do things you want' is like, our entire thing.

There's a balance that has to be struck between how much you want your drones to report to you, and how much you want them to rely on either protocol or judgment. If you're fine with being annoyed and having to sift through status reports, telling your drones to have more detailed reporting will probably be good."

"I have access to his memories, I just need to take the time to look through them. And I'm fine with status reports." He turns to the drone. "Log a preference for more detailed status reports."

And now he'll have a look at Gifit's memories. How did he manage his drones? Also, according to said memories, what's the status of the following here: vacuum tubes, transistors, magnetic tape, knowledge of U-235 being the right isotope for chain fission reactions and centrifuge operation, dubious radiation fads, phonograph with vinyl records, silver nitrite/nitrate(?) film, liquid crystal displays, cathode ray tube with red green and blue phosphor dots (what cones do aliens have anyway?), light-emitting diodes, batteries, and electrical amplification for music instruments? And how hard is it to get drones to learn musical instruments? It seems aesthetically correct for someone in his position to have a chamber orchestra.

[Gifit took a hands-off approach with managing his drones, and didn't really do much corporal punishment, although it did occur occasionally. He usually supervises the work process closely enough to forestall problems and not need that many detailed reports, and besides, he has been running this estate with very little change for dozens of years now.

Vacuum tubes: Yes.
Transistors: weird science thing.
Magnetic tape: he's heard about it being used for recording but it's worse than vinyl. Very promising though!
U-235: what is that?
Radiation: It's not good for you but you don't really need to worry about it unless you work with it.
Phonographs and vinyl: some of his friends have one!
Film: They have both monochrome and color film that's sensitive enough to be used with fractions-of-a-second exposure times.
Liquid crystal displays: what is that? Seems like a weird science thing.
Cathode ray tube: weird science thing. They have humanoid three-color vision.
Light emitting diodes: weird science thing.
Batteries: Yes, most popularly zinc-carbon ones.
Electric amplification of sound: Yes, with vacuum tubes.]

They don't know what the chain-reaction-friendly isotope of uranium is yet! Griffith gets to work on fission power! This is going to be really cool, and also probably more tedious than it sounded in people's biographies, but still. Also, can he actually get paid for demonstrating that refrigerants can harm ozone and that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide can trap more heat? He wants to do this either way, but knowing whether there's bounties for that sort of thing is relevant. There's apparently prediction markets, at least.

"Thank you for your advice. Actually, I think I do want to form a company with Xaber if he's interested, because according to Gifit's memories you're missing some key insights into fission plants, and I think it sounds incredibly aesthetic to do a bunch of work on fission power, which will hopefully compensate for tediousness."

Cadmium control rods to absorb neutrons and slow things down, though those are toxic and need to be handled accordingly! Graphite to something something neutrons something something go faster! Heavy water to … it'll probably come up if he pokes at his thoughts more but he's pretty sure it's relevant!

[It's not that hard to teach drones how to play music. It's about as hard as teaching them to operate industrial machinery – teaching drones how to play music is approached mechanistically. Many, many drills on correct fingering, sight reading, and potentially playing by ear. No improvisation though. And drones don't compose music, they merely play it. Imperial sheet music also has many more symbols for describing specifically how a note should be played – there is very little room for interpretation.

Choir pieces are very popular in the Imperium, and every city will have at least one that will train your drones to sing. It's also partly because drones can sing while working, and you don't need to buy or carry instruments in order to get drones to do choral pieces. Music involving instruments will be a little more expensive.

You can have musician drones simply by buying one from a seller. Musician drones are considered to be highly trained drones, so they'll be on the upper range of drone prices. You're looking at at least six gross rupnu. More if the drone is proficient in multiple instruments. The price for drones who can only sing is lower, though, starting at five gross rupnu.

Alternatively, you can send a drone to be trained to play an instrument. Usually the seller will administer some sort of test to see the baseline characteristics of the drone and try to measure its potential as a musician. That usually goes for six to eight rupnu and lasts the entire day. After that, they'll give you an estimate for how long the training will take, usually expressed in dozens of days, and the price thereof, with the price of each day of training being two to ten rupnu per day, depending on the training conditions, the trainer themselves, the instrument, and the level of instruction. The standard duration is at least a season, or a gross days, but often it lasts for one whole year.]

"Wonderful. I'll contact him once I get back home, and I'll arrange a time and place for you to meet.

Fission power? Does your world have nuclear fission power plants? Were you an engineer in your old life?"

"Thank you for planning to arrange a meeting. And we do have nuclear fission plants! They're expensive to build, and they work pretty well if they're managed decently. I wasn't a nuclear engineer, though, I just read some books about physics and chemistry and some people's biographies and news articles and such. And I went to a presentation once that was about what it's like to be a military reactor operator but it was mostly about the military and not about the reactor operation, which was disappointing. I worked at a company that filled extremely recent corpses with antifreeze – we couldn't tell patients to biologically produce their own antifreeze – and cooled them to liquid-nitrogen temperatures in the hopes that maybe medical science could advance to the point of reviving and un-poisoning them or doing other good things with the information in their brains."

(And okay, that pricing information is useful, but how does it compare to his estate's annual profit, and for that matter its liquid wealth?)

"I'm...confused about that presentation. Could I have more context on that? The military had a presentation on military reactor operation?"

[His estate's annual profit, counting only expenses from the estate's infrastructure (excluding what he buys for himself, and taking care of the drones) is about eleven to a dozen gross rupnu. He spends about ten to eleven gross rupnu on himself and the drones per year, and saves the rest.

He has about two dozen and two gross rupnu in bank savings and gold that he has stored on the estate itself.]

"The military has submarines with fission reactors on board to provide power for the submarines, since the fuel for those is pretty compact, and they wanted submarines to be operable a long while without refueling. They also have some on land, I think? And the military always needs new workers, because of population turnover and also, well, military conflict kills people. So they have workers go around telling people about joining various parts of the military, including the operating reactors part. I'm not sure what step here is confusing."

"Yeah, that was the confusing part. The military here doesn't really...advertise like that? Probably because everyone already knows you can join the military as an officer, and basically everyone who wants to do that has already done so, and all of the low-level personnel are drones which have been sold to the state. So you don't really need to...'entice' people with knowledge the same way you might beautify packaging to get people to buy it."

"Yeah, population turnover means Earth people need to spend a lot of time telling newer people stuff that older people already know. I guess all the implications of that or its absence aren't obvious. Anyway, thanks to you it sounds like I have the outline of a plan for the estate and a plan for working on technology – fortunately for you but perhaps annoyingly for me, a lot of stuff I could provide a few early insights on already appear in Gifit's memories as things people are already exploring."

"Ah, yeah. We do have that problem too, in the sense of people forgetting things and having to relearn them, but that's much easier to fix that starting from scratch.

You're very welcome. I look forward to the technology you'll bring us."

Damin yawns.

"I'm feeling kind of tired now. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? Otherwise, I'll sleep, and we can talk again tomorrow."

"Nothing that seems particularly urgent to me? I look forward to seeing you tomorrow."

And Griffith spends the rest of his evening trying to dictate everything he knows about nuclear power, and goes to sleep probably later than Damin, but not before instructing his staff to wake him when Damin is ready for social interaction.

"Likewise. See you tomorrow," Damin says, before he leaves, following one of Griffith's drones leading him to the guest room.

Griffith's drones will take dictation and tell him when Damin is ready to talk. Which is half an hour after sunrise. Damin is expecting breakfast, which the drones will bring to the table. Does Griffith want to eat alone or talk while eating?

Breakfast with conversation sounds good.

The drones will prepare breakfast for two.

"Gifit was usually interested in hearing about my petty dramas. Are you? You seem more...technical...than him. A lot of people dislike drama. I live for it." Damin laughs.

"I think hearing about it will be informative about local culture, so go ahead and tell me things."

He sighs, but smiles. "See...when you put it like that you make it sound so unappealing and unsexy. Like I'm reading a history textbook to you. Hmph."

Nom nom nom.

"I'll tell you a little. Konrad gets hit on a lot, see, and, well, that's not surprising, given how hot he is, but the issue is that he doesn't keep any drones, so he doesn't really have a way of telling people off. And I offer to have my drones accompany him, but he refuses. Anyway, I saw this article from this one local teletype blogger who, although he didn't name him directly, wrote an accurate description of him, and said that Keepers walking without drones should be illegal, because he got rebuffed. Apparently Konrad stabbed him in the arm. So. In hindsight that wasn't petty drama, actually, he might get sued.

Honestly! I can't believe I'm still with this man. All the trouble he puts me through!" Damin gesticulates wildly with both arms and aftendrils.

Sip of water.

"I would ask you what's going on in your life but like, I imagine this incident pales in comparison to basically losing your old life and having it be replaced with another one." Damin looks abashed.

"Is your guess that Konrad was stuck escalating to that given the other person's behavior, in which case I am rather disappointed that your – our monoecious nature hasn't led to better behavior regarding these matters, or is it more the case that if I want to flirt with someone whose retinue isn't present I ought to do so from a safe distance? I've never been stabbed or had to deal with an unwanted admirer trying to corner me, but a lot of the female people I dated were pretty concerned with checking that their partners weren't inclined towards rape, and given crime statistics they had a point. And I could tell you about the domestic companion animal I had, or recent broadcast media productions, or such, if you'd like."

"Oh, sorry, right, I need to explain assuming no context. So, when you want to come on to someone, you approach them. That's good. That's great. But you don't want to make it too easy for them. That's no fun. So you like...make motions to resist. Or try to stop them. In the past people would literally chase each other through the forests, but many people now don't have either the fitness or nature-survival knowledge to actually do that. But sometimes you resist because you literally do not want to be with them. We distinguish between those using drones. If I don't involve my drones and just have myself try to get away from you or fight you or stop you, then you keep going. But if I tell my drones to block you off, then you know that I'm Truly Not Interested. 

You see now where the issue is if you don't have drones with you. People without drones are like, really rare. Less than one in a gross gross – I don't know the statistics. I'm not sure there are even statistics of such people out there.

Right, you're dioecious and dimorphic. What are the difference between males and females? You were a male in your old boy, yes? 

I would love that. I'm surprised your people have domestic animals. Are they useful?"

"You literally … that's, uh, wow. That's a set of norms. It seems kind of hot to me to be pursued that way but kind of a mess as the normal way of flirting? Apparently less so with drones as a signaling medium. It's too bad they don't fail more gracefully in the case of someone going out without drones, it really seems to me that if you don't have a clear signal established for the person you want to play that sort of game with conveying actual disinterest then you just shouldn't play and if you try to anyway and end up stabbed that's on you. But maybe if I were talking to a friend of the stabbee they'd tell things differently."

"Anyway. Differences between male and female adult humans include size, sex drive intensity, upper body strength, and short- to medium-distance running speed, and propensity towards direct physical violence, all of which are higher in males … those aren't necessarily the most dramatic differences, they just sprang to mind in the context of this, uh, courtship custom. Some sex differences are mediated by genetics, such as the prevalence of color blindness – are you familiar with chromosomal systems of sex determination, some activation gene appearing on an unusually short chromosome? Birds have the short chromosome in females, humans have it in males. This is obviously relevant to recessive diseases located on the chromosome pair that includes the sex chromosome, the sex with the unusually shortened chromosome will be more prone to them due to lacking redundancy. In humans that includes red-green color blindness. Other factors are somewhat mediated by hormones, such as the growth of breasts – female humans typically tend to grow them and have them present even in the absence of lactation, male humans don't. Male humans tend to grow a lot of thick hair on their faces, female humans tend not to. I was male in my old body but taking low doses of a cross-sex hormone for its plausible effects on lifespan and its mild positive effect on my mood."

"Humans have a lot of built-up social norms around sexes. In part this is because in the past upper-body strength mattered even more for industry and violence, alternatives to human milk for feeding babies were worse, prevention of pregnancy wasn't reliably feasible, et cetera. So we end up with this incredibly irritating system where female people are pushed to specialize in producing and raising children and low-physical-strength interruption-friendly forms of labor like spinning thread, and male people are pushed towards roles requiring strength and violence, and of course if one group is successfully specializing in violence, then that group ends up having an unfortunately disproportionate impact on norms to the detriment of other groups, which is bad. It's really very disappointing that for all our intelligence and technical development people still commit sexual assault."

"We have domestic animals. There are food-producing animals, like I've mentioned, and small felines which historically were used to hunt mice but also were just very appealing to us, and a lot of different breeds of domestic canines trained for various tasks, though these days they're also popular as companions. Even though their need for exercise and socialization is often higher than they can really get while being companions, it's unfortunate, I tried to pick a breed that'd be relatively okay being home alone. You can use them to prompt you to go for walks, and people like them so it can be a conversation-starter, and they have good textures and you can play some simple games with them like throwing things for them to fetch, and you can have them as a source of companionship in your home without the same complicatedness that bringing in another person to live with you would cause."

"People who literally don't have drones are really rare, and...a significant number of the people of the people who go out 'without drones'," he makes quotation marks in the air – they're differently shaped from Earth quotation marks, "are into the idea of being taken 'against their will'. Really they have drones who are hiding on standby if they don't actually like what's happening. So it's just really messy. Generally, brandishing weapons will get them to turn away, because although you might bruise and scratch each other, it's...traditional and expected to do that unarmed, using only the tools that nature gave you. It doesn't stop everyone though, clearly.

Mm. Sexual dimorphism seems really problematic. I couldn't imagine having to choose between being strong and being able to give birth to my own children. 

I'm...I read about that, but I couldn't remember the specifics. Thank you for the refresher. 

Interesting. Lactation for you is hormonal? For us, it just has to do with direct stimulation. Usually you'll want to do that a season before your baby hatches, so that you'll be producing enough milk for them. After that, the baby's suckling will be enough to sustain it. Many people continue to do it even without the baby, because they like that. Including yours truly.

Is taking cross-sex hormones common? Would that impair fertility?

Ugh. Yes, sexual dimorphism is very problematic. Although, I get that initially females would have to submit to males because of the strength disadvantage, but once you have tools it becomes moot, no? Especially since you're living together. I'm weaker than Konrad, but if he tried to threaten me, I'd stab him with my spindle.

We have food-producing domestic animals, as you know, but no non-food-producing domestic animals we keep for like, pest-keeping or companionship. That can already be had with drones. It makes sense that a droneless species would have them, though. There do exist people here who keep pets, but it's a niche hobby. Many of them are zoologists of some sort. I don't think we have domestic canines or felines, but I know some people keep snakes."

"It clearly doesn't stop everyone, indeed! What a mess. It's really too bad that your boyfriend gets treated this way."

"There are strong female humans, if you were a female human and put lots of time into exercising and had good food you'd be stronger than a lot of male humans, especially now that strength-based work is increasingly being outsourced to machines. Lactation for humans is hormonal, but the hormones are related to direct stimulation, and I wouldn't be surprised if zmavlipre in fact invented lactation-inducing hormones in the future. Though just giving birth tends to lead to a human body to be prepared to lactate, I don't know why it doesn't for you. Taking cross-sex hormones is rather rare – less than one pergross of the population does it – and does impair fertility, but fertility can come back if you stop taking them. Strength disparity also affects tool-wielding, though less so in the case of tools that provide their own force, such as guns, and it's essentially irrelevant in the case of poisoned food or such, though it's harder to argue that such usage of poison constituted self-defense under typical legal codes."

"And maybe I should get a snake. What do you know about snake-keeping here?"

"Truly, although in his case he could just keep just one drone and be done with it forever. Actually, he doesn't need to own it, just let one of my drones accompany him. But he likes being truly alone.

We're oviparous, so after you give birth*, you need to wait a year before the egg actually hatches and gives you a baby to breastfeed. 

Not a lot. There's a shop in Kosfor, I think. Sells various reptiles and amphibians, not just snakes. I know that people keep nonvenomous and nonpoisonous snakes, and that they breed them for docility and for beautiful coloration. And they're useful too. The skin – both the shed skin and the actual one – are used in things like jewelry."

* Give-birth and lay-egg are the same word in Standard Imperial, with compounds being used to distinguish if necessary.

"I have opinions mostly on the axis people here apparently don't track much. On axes you do track … it seems ugly for roleplaying to so overwhelm honest communication that it doesn't even leave honest communication one small signaling channel, does that opinion make sense? And, right, oviparity versus viviparity, you wouldn't want to lactate right after laying an egg. I'll probably look into snakes at some point, I don't think we have much snake-breeding for docility at home."

"Yes. But see, as I said before, not going around with even one drone is very very rare, so such a signaling channel wouldn't really develop. Unless everyone starts becoming like Konrad. For as much as I like the man, that wouldn't be good for our society.

I wish you luck on your snake keeping endeavors."

Damin lies back on the chaise longue and has his drone, Ders, drop pitted lychees into his mouth. 

"Do tell me about those recent media broadcasts you were talking about. What's on them? How are they broadcast?"

"We have audio and color audiovisual shows broadcast over radio waves. There's some which are 'live', meaning that the show is of something currently happening, and those tend towards athletic competitions or commentary thereon, shows which take telecommunications from listeners or viewers, direct broadcast or discussion of ongoing events of interest, and discussion of local weather conditions. There's also some which are pre-recorded. For audiovisual broadcasts, this includes artistic content like dances, visually appealing informational content that isn't time-sensitive like information about gardening, special competitions that are just for broadcast purposes and for which timeskips are beneficial, et cetera. For audio broadcasts it's usually music, with different radio frequencies having different genres of music, but occasional broadcasters will tell stories or such. Also it's often free, because radio broadcast favors that, and funded by people who pay to have popular broadcasts interrupted with mentions of their products."

"Wow. I can't wait for us to develop such a thing. That sounds great. Hm...although, the funding. Many people will not like the advertisement interruptions. And if it's being broadcast wirelessly, then there wouldn't be a way to make it such that only paying customers could access it. Probably people would find it tolerable so long as the advertisements adopted the same aesthetic as the shows they were embedded in – certainly that is the case with advertisements in cities.

Did you watch a lot of that? What shows did you watch?"

"So, I think it's possible to do access-restricted radio broadcasts, it's just more difficult. If you can't make the unrestricted ones profitable maybe they'll just be full of things broadcast because the sender wants to broadcast them, or maybe the Imperium will have to allocate less bandwidth – people can't broadcast two things nearby on the same frequency so it needs to be allocated by someone. Probably the Imperium will just treat it like land, it's a rivalrous natural resource. Anyway, I liked a video broadcast about historic farming practices, and some of the music audio broadcasts. I liked the broadcasts about gardening when I was younger, but I didn't end up with good opportunities to garden as an adult so I didn't keep liking them because it made me vaguely disappointed with my choices even though I broadly endorsed them."

"Yes, that makes sense. Like public service announcements. The Imperium does actually regulate radio frequencies now, because of wireless telegraph transmissions, but if people are using them to transmit voice and audio, then it will have to be more rigorously regulated. Probably some sort of land tax like thing will be applied to it.

Interesting. Given our technology level relative to yours, I bet we would give off the same energy as those farming broadcasts, although I doubt the knowledge would transfer, given our different crops and growing season and whatnot.

My sympathies. Well, at least you get to garden now!" He laughs.

"I'm surprised that they don't show porn on the broadcasts. Or, no, surely they do, you just didn't use it as an example."

"Porn was to my knowledge only on access-restricted broadcasts. Many people, myself included, considered sufficiently sexual imagery to be inappropriate to have readily available such that one could encounter it accidentally. Though the lines people draw are culturally bound and somewhat arbitrary, it's common to use imagery of scantily-clad attractive people when promoting your product even if it's nonsexual. Many people find it aversive – there are plausible arguments that it's implicitly insulting to various groups – and there's speculation that it's harmful or otherwise inappropriate to children to encounter, though the harm claim hasn't been well-researched and inappropriateness is subjective. Also, it was I expect profitable to access-restrict video-broadcast porn, though I don't have a solid model of that."

"...inappropriate why? Why is it aversive?"

Damin purses his lips and closes his nictitating membranes, [which is culturally equivalent to squinting your eyes].

"I really don't know where to start, but I can try to explain? It's very attention-grabbing and visceral, which means that if you're not in the mood for it can provoke strong negative emotions while also being hard to look away from or forget about, and for some people it can produce unwanted arousal, which can feel like a violation of personal boundaries or something, especially to people who are opposed to porn. Inappropriateness … so, for humans wanting to have sex tends to show up late in puberty, and unwanted sex is generally rather harmful. And there's a phenomenon of wanting to shield children from harmful things and depictions thereof. Does that gesture at the conceptual space?"

"Mmm. Yeah, we don't have that here? If you don't like what's being shown you can just turn it off or look away? And people here seem much less averse to sex than on your world.

I get not having sex with children – we don't do that here because they don't really understand what it's about until puberty, but I don't see how them seeing it is harmful. Or why depictions of sex is."

He claps his hand.

"I'm kind of too tired to interrogate that topic right now, so let's talk about something else. Semisal and Rapap just happened. Ah, that's an artistic gymnastics competition. Do you have gymnastics in your world? You said you had sports. Which are popular?"

"We have gymnastics. Popular sports include football, er, American football, which– maybe I should give a broader overview. There's a lot of competitive ball-based sports. These tend to take the form of two teams in a play area, who each get points for scoring goals by getting the ball into a space their opposing team guards. Members of the teams specialize in different roles. Within this category there's American football, in which the play area is grass, attempting to wrestle the ball out of the possession of the opposing team is somewhat permitted and goals are scored by throwing and the 'ball' is actually a bit pointy, the sport globally called football but in the Fractious States called soccer in which the play area is grass and players can't touch the ball with their hands, one called basketball typically played indoors in which the ball may be touched and bounced but not held and goals are scored by throwing the ball into a very elevated basket, and some others. Outside this category there's automotive races, a type of formalized fistfighting, a game of hitting balls into small holes located across large landscapes, performing stunts with human-powered wheeled vehicles… I could go on? Gymnastics isn't particularly popular for broadcast video that I've noticed, though it does get broadcast when it's part of the big every-few-years international sports competition."

"Ah, I think we have something similar. We don't have automotive race sports, but that's probably because our state of automotive technology isn't very advanced. I'm surprised gymnastics isn't more popular – it's very fun to watch. It's one of the most popular if not the most popular sport here. It's a little ambiguous because it contains subdivisions."

Damin will continue to talk to Griffith about various other low-stakes topics as they finish up breakfast.

Griffith will solicit some introductory fiction recommendations, if that's adequately low-stakes, and also some advice on how to engage with the fact that he has a really flaky chemistry background basically centered around miscellaneous books and other articles that he read for fun, without mentioning the other-world thing.

"Presumably you want stuff which doesn't have much sex in it? Do you want fiction only in book form, or are you fine with plays, whether live or in scripts, LARP, teletype text roleplay, or board games?"

"Hm? What do you mean? Ah, are you concerned that people won't take you seriously? I can just say that you seem to have promising ideas and I feel that you're not lying or misrepresenting yourself – people trust my social intuitions. And you can show that you mean business by staking money or investing in yourself: so, in the case of you being hired by Xaber, you could say that you'll contribute a bunch of your savings into creating the initial prototypes or something, in exchange for you getting a slightly higher percentage of future profit. By putting real money on the line, it will mean that people will take what you say seriously, since you're confident enough to risk losing that amount."

"I'm also interested in stuff with sex in it, but not only that. In terms of format I'd like something I can interact with at home, without having unusual reactions everyone around me notices and may be distracted by, since I'm very new to this form of entertainment. And I'll keep that in mind regarding money, that does sound like a signal that's hard to use dishonestly if you're not outright counterfeiting currency or such."

"Hm, in that case scripts of plays or fiction books would be best. I prefer social stuff like LARPs or board games, but I do read stuff from time to time. Or, more accurately, have my drones read to me."

He'll give a couple of recommendations. He says that he'll give recommendations suited more towards the sort of media he would recommend to an alien to whom he wants to showcase the best of Imperial culture, and less about personal enjoyment to Griffith. Partly because it seems like it would be more useful to him, and partly because he doesn't know enough about Griffith's tastes to confidently make recommendations.

- 'Tempat's Plea' is a historical play about a parent whose partner left him and refused to pay his children's allotment after landing a more lucrative job elsewhere. It's a musical, too! There is sheet music and lyrics along with the dialog.
- 'Eight Courses' is a really expansive series of books about a magic system based on personality types and emotions, where people have to cultivate certain mindstates in order to practice magic. There's a lot of worldbuilding and interiority with the characters as they become stronger, but also change more as practicing stronger magic necessitated cultivating stronger emotions.

"Indeed. Drone expertise is very legible, but Keeper expertise is the reverse. People prefer not to reveal too much about themselves, and prefer not to have the structured courses and exams drone education has. There have been cases of people counterfeiting paper currency, but it's very rare. Someone really really paranoid or skeptical might ask you to put forward gold, but Xaber won't ask that."

"Thank you for the recommendations. I'm not used to the option of privacy, I'll have to see what I want to do with it. I guess it's a sort of convenient thing to have strong cultural norms about if I can't just tell everyone I'm psychologically an alien and have them believe me." For instance, he's going to try not mentioning to anyone besides his drones that he's also interested in young children's fiction.

"Hm, it's not a norm, exactly, more like...everyone mutually understands that people don't really prefer revealing things to each other? At least not with strangers. It's not enforced. You can totally just reveal things about yourself if you want. That's permitted.

But yeah, people won't necessarily believe what you say, and will want evidence or credible signals."

"Reasonable of them, I suppose. Is there any amount of evidence or credible signals I could produce eventually that'd convince people I'm psychologically an alien?"

"I don't know. We haven't exactly had this situation before. Is it important to you? If you want to simply adopt a new identity separate from Gifit, you can sell your possessions, move, and change your name. Or just change your name and say you want to go in a new direction in life. That's fine too. The Church might be able to help with that."

"I want to be able to talk about my past experiences without everyone except maybe you assuming I'm lying. Over the long term I would expect to be very frustrated by the inability to."

"Ah. Usually we have the opposite problem: people being too reticent to share things.

I'm not sure how to help with that. The best thing I could think of is to use hypnosis to reduce that urge to share, but I'm not sure you want that. Sincere condolences. 

Probably if you get close enough to someone and build up enough trust with them they'll treat what you say as fact despite its unbelievability, simply because their prior for you saying the truth is already very high. I think getting people in general to accept your past would be impossible, though. Not unless we all suddenly become like the people in your world."

"I'm going to perpetually want to say things like 'in my world, we had a system of people registering patents on inventions and then getting enforced limited-term rights to be the sole entity to profit from them, which led to information being more public and less concentrated in trade secrets, but also it was often at least arguably abused' when trade-secrets-related problems come up, or 'it's possible to develop a liquid-nitrogen-temperature superconductor and use it for neat things, I don't know how to do this and I don't know what laws of materials science suggest it's possible but it will definitely be within our nearish-future capabilities' and it's going to get really annoying. I'm not sure what a normal keeper would want to feel if they had potentially useful information nobody would believe them about and which wasn't very usable in the absence of open discussion of it."